Typography: It's pretty damn important.

Typography is in everything we read. It's used in everything from billboards, TV commercials, websites, to your pet's bag of food. It's the art of designing type, understanding what looks good and what doesn't, and what looks best when marketing a product or even an idea. In short, typography is everything.

I came across Typophile.com, a community of people obsessed with type. It's got people designing the layouts of multilingual books, beer bottles, and more. It's a place where the term 'nitpicking' doesn't exist, because while it looks like a massive debate about minutiae, it's an intricate discussion about the designs that shape our world.

Since this is my blog and I talk about the things I find interesting, I'm pasting the introductory blog post I made on Typophile as a means of reminding myself to stick with the site. It's probably not very interesting to you that the way a certain letter curves at the end can make or break a design, but it's becoming more fascinating to me. Anyway, at the risk of overlapping what I said over on that site, down to business.

What's up folks. I came across this site recently and decided to jump aboard.

The idea of breaking down a typeface into its most minute aspects used to seem unnecessary. Coming from a web design background, I chose one of the 11 web-safe fonts and pushed ahead. When CSS came along and positioning became a lot more malleable a component of the design process, I began to see type in a different way. More recently, embedding just about any font into a website has become possible through various means including CSS and XML-injected Flash content. That's when I knew I should take this stuff more seriously.

So I'm here to browse conversations, and learn from what appear to be a community of some very learned individuals. I've already seen a few typography books mentioned as must-haves and will be picking them up sooner than later. So my hopes in being a part of this site is that it will become part of my daily routine, and I'll pick up some knowledge I otherwise can't afford to get in a classroom environment.

A couple of those books on my wish list are Otl Aicher's typographie and Joseph Blumenthal's Typographic Years. Knowing many of the greatest type designers did everything by hand, I feel pretty lucky my road to becoming a typographical Zen master is paved with computers.

So the next time you take a look at the name on the side of a building or peruse your grocery store's frozen food section, take a pause and think of how the decision to use that specific font... in that size... in that position, more than likely involved a hell of a lot of hours to come up with.